The intent is that it was customer money. There is a fiduciary duty. They have separate custodial accounts for customer funds. They did not separate funds. It was clear as day.
We used Braintree and during the time they were bought out by PayPal and all th terrible PayPal support was integrated. We could never reach a live person at Braintree again and ended up switching processors.
It's scary to think a processor can't answer a phone call but hold your entire business' money in their hands.
I run $1,000's if not $10,000's a day in FB ads. I can confirm we've all known this for quite a long time.
Our general rule is if the product doesn't have broad appeal, you don't run it on FB.
My running theory on all ad networks is pretty simple. There are a very small subset of users, 25%-30%, of people who are regular purchasers and these companies know that based on conversion data. They generally just throw your ad in front of these people and let it ride.
It should be. I was at a talk where they said Envoy was and I believe that Istio is coming soon. From what I remember, Envoy is what you need to plugin to bridge your infrastructure.
Right? I feel like this article was just another way to get publicity and social traffic to his domain. Anyone worth their salt would know he's probably stuck in the "Google Sandbox" https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-sandbox/
It seems to be working. We are all here commenting on a page that's linked to a page, that's linked to his "slightly better than thin" collection of affiliate link loaded articles.
And, despite all the various measurable quality signals, content quality, etc...Google organic rankings still mostly care about links.
It's a good article. There are some quotes in it that galvanize my point. E.g.
"I know for a fact that it’s possible to circumvent these sandbox effects. If a site goes even somewhat viral and is getting a few hundred to a few thousand daily unique visits, some social media mentions each day, and real backlinks, that site will immediately be taken seriously by Google’s algorithms. I’ve seen this happen twice so far with brand new websites, eventually ranking #1 for their top keywords."
My experience has been the same. Except in this case...and it just struck me as strange.
Keep it simple. I use ssh-agent .. just ~/.ssh/ - keep keys here. Backup the actual private keys and stick those on a drive you keep in a safe. Make sure your machine's HD is encrypted and you should be fine.
I think that like anything, it's exploitable. Just see the example of bitcoin where a mining pool had over 50% of the computing power. If the internet was driven by a block chain, with enough money and time, you could "control it".
Owning 50% of the mining infrastructure is not an exploit. The system is designed with that in mind - anyone in control of that much hash power has no incentive to use it, because the value of the currency would instantly evaporate. They in fact have strong incentives to avoid putting themselves in that position - because it devalues the currency (which they have invested so heavily in), and makes them a target for attack. And that is exactly what we saw when ghash hit 50 percent.
Anyway, it's a false choice. I'll take the hyper-public well described risk of a 50% 'attack' over the risks of counterfeit paper currency manipulated in secret by unelected officials any day. Similarly, it'd take much more time and money to control a blockchain based internet than the one we have now, and if it were exploited in that way, it'd be substantially more likely to be known by everyone, which in itself is a deterrent to exploiting it in the first place.
All that being said, there are probably reasons that other architectures on which to build an overlay network are better than this - but 'exploitability' is not one of them.
>> I think this is a strange way of looking at things. What non-trivial protocol doesn't have known design limitations?
It's still a weakness, not a feature, and when a blockchain is not a monetary thing the pressures and incentives to run infrastructure will be different, it's hard to say that a 50% attack won't be possible or desirable in that circumstance.
>> Moreover, what could you possibly hope for in addition to a self-mitigating limitation, i.e: a theoretical limit that doesn't matter in practice?
It's not theoretical though, pools have got there with BTC. There are incentives not to obviously mess with the currency at that point but perhaps subtle ways to operate to your own benefit could happen at that point.
It's a huge design flaw though. The original intention of the blockchain in Bitcoin was to make it so it was decentralized...except the increase in computational difficulty, the winner-takes-all payouts, and the electrical cost, of course means that eventually the only people running the blockchain are large centralized organizations.
At which point one can wonder, why bother being distributed when we're still ultimately invoking trust in several groups? Couldn't we do this a lot more simply and efficiently by just having everyone delegate a private key signing operation to these groups so that it's just based on maintaining consensus, rather then burning CPU time on computationally hard problems?
Wouldn't people notice it though ? I mean if you hold 50% percent of that computing power, wouldn't someone detect that a large portion of the network traffic revolves around one place ?
Also people would notice that the internet would be "off".
